About Me

Wednesday, April 07, 2010

Easter

Easter in our family is an excuse to eat. My sweetie and I are atheists, but he has many fond memories of his large extended Italian family gathering on Easter to consume vast quantities of food, so we are continuing the tradition in our house. I even made his Nana's Easter Pie:

Easter Pie is a wonder: dense as a brick, but so addictive that you will eat a second piece and immediately regret it. It is a pie crust wrapped around Swiss cheese, Italian sausage, ham and hard boiled eggs, then washed with a sugar-and-egg glaze. The sugar glaze makes the pie: it's what convinces you that second piece is a good idea.

The recipe I got from my sweetie's Nana (via his aunt) was just what you would expect from a 93-year-old woman who's been making it for decades. It started out "Make a pie crust," instructed me to assemble "some" ham, cheese, and sausage (but specified four hard boiled eggs), then, for the egg wash, suggested beating an egg with some sugar. When I asked whether we were talking a tablespoon of sugar or a half cup of sugar, no further clarification beyond "Nana just tastes it" was forthcoming.

I made it last year: 2 tablespoons was not enough. This year I used 1/4 cup and it was almost--but not quite--right. And oh yeah: the pie weighed 17 lbs going into the oven. It was a monster. Fortunately we had guests to help eat it. Plus we gave leftovers to the teenaged boy next door.

At my sweetie's insistence, we also dyed eggs:

Our cutie was already in bed by the time we created these beauties. But he got to enjoy them the following day: